NASCAR in need of some drama

Banjo Matthews was a NASCAR driver in the late fifties and into the early sixties, who became a mechanic and owner. Along with the likes of Smokey Yunick, he owned his own shop. Not like the clinical looking NASCAR shops today but garages where you could have work done, whether it was the day driver or your hot rod for racing out on Airport Road at night for ‘Pinks.’

The NASCAR rule book reads the way it does today because of mechanics and racers like Yunick, Matthews, Junior Johnson and a host of others who reveled in the gray area of the older rule books.

Recently, Chad Knaus has been a quiet exponent of creative engineering, but with him, it’s kind of like finding out that your accountant keeps a secret blue pen in his drawer. Wow.

Each year NASCAR wonders what has happened to its ratings and where attendance is going to. To solve the attendance problem, in part, they are removing seats.

Not exactly a cheat, since many of the tracks over built. But as to the viewing public, as Richard Dawson of Family Feud would start: “Survey says” Old time fans are going away, not just via the mortician, and new ones are not always staying.

Richard Petty’s take was this: “You’d be out here at Darlington with 50 laps to go. It’s 95 degrees outside and you’re just dying, and then David would go blowing by you and he’s driving with one hand and lighting a cigarette with the other. You knew you were in trouble then, but it was kind of cool, too.”

Corporate dollars have become an uneven double edged sword. Sure, we see the benefits of the money bringing quality and parity to the sport. But along with this we have seen the bleaching of passion away from the racing.

As a former holder of Patriots season tickets, there was no greater marker of trouble for a player than to see Bill Parcells pulling off his head phones after a play. Woe betides the player when there is only one hundred yards of sideline to hide on.

Yet at NASCAR races when they show the owner, no matter what is going on, they make the sphinx look like it’s in a hip hop video. Whatever damage has been done, from Kyle Busch’s smash mouth of Ron Hornaday into the wall with clear intent at 140 MPH to last year’s cheatathon by Michael Waltrip Racing at Richmond, no one is visibly mad, overly upset or pulling off their head phones.

They retreat to haulers and trailers and have media personnel write nice ‘how do you do’s’ about it that reads like so much legal puke and then move on.

Mike Helton’s “Have it, boys” should be extended to the owners. How about seeing Rick Hendricks and Gene Haas storming down the pit lane to give Waltrip a fast ride off the top of a high pit box at Richmond? As to Waltrip’s own driver, Martin Truex, eliminated from the chase by this Himalayan size stunt, I would have parked on the start-finish line and torched the car.

At every race there is a lot on the line. Everyone from owners, racers, crew chiefs and the guy who sweeps the garage all have emotions that make them work crazy, stupid hours every week from February to November. NASCAR needs to stop trying to put those emotions in lockers before the race.

“Have at it boys” should rule the whole garage, and when audiences return and ad rates climb, the corporate sponsors can act like they invented the concept of real drama.